Workaholism-Not an asset, a sickness

Jobs can kill

I write on sites in the US and Europe on employment issues.
Overwork is a major problem around the world. It’s an easily avoidable
situation, and there are much better career approaches. This is an analysis of
basic issues.

In the 80s, being a workaholic was an achievement. People
would work mindlessly for long hours, and their conversation degenerated into
talking about nothing but working long hours. Their lives vanished. There are a
lot of myths about workaholism, and they’ve become entrenched in the employment
market as some sort of symbol of success.

The facts about workaholism are a lot less impressive:

If you
have to work extremely long hours for long periods, you’ll eventually
wreck your health. Overwork and stress are inseparable.

Why
does it take you 14 hours to do a job supposed to be done in 8 hours? If
you’re taking on extra work, what’s in it for you, if anything?

Is the
work productive or necessary? If so, why aren’t people being hired to do
it faster and more efficiently? Are you just the pack mule in the
workplace?

If the
work isn’t providing clear benefits, profits, or other real results, it’s
a hideous waste of time and effort which could be done doing almost
anything else which would be productive.

Even
the most fanatical careerists don’t work for no results. Workaholics, on
the other hand, will work on principle, or for the illusory nod of
approval from a boss which actually means nothing.

Fear
of losing a job is another factor. The naiveté of workaholism is well
illustrated by the basic theory that hard workers don’t get sacked. Wrong.
Good workers shouldn’t get sacked, but they do. Until there’s formal
business training for managers teaching them to recognize productive,
efficient workers, they will continue to get sacked.

If this looks like internal and external stresses are the
basic scenario for workaholics, it is. Workaholics simply go over the edge and
don’t even look where they’re going afterwards. The result is “crash and burn”
to apocalyptic levels, and it’s often career destroying.

Bad job design

Another reason for workaholism is that bad job design gives
people lots of work which simply can’t be done efficiently. It has to be done,
so the result is a sort of pseudo-workaholism. Long hours, endless issues, and
no level of efficiency. The effects are identical. A good worker burns out for
no good reason. The work isn’t even particularly useful, often just management
bureaucracy or administrative minutiae a competent business manager would
eliminate.

The career issues

Sadly, a lot of the workaholic’s extra work isn’t even
useful on a CV. The ability to say you’re a team player doesn’t mean much if
the team’s playing major league football and you’ve spent a career playing
minor league marbles. The fatal mistake is that all that work goes exactly
nowhere in career terms.

Worse, the highly inefficient types of work are also
obsolete. Turgid days and nights of number crunching aren’t exactly best
practice. The workaholic literally stuffs their resume with ancient rituals,
then wonders where all the job opportunities went.

Recognition and peer groups

If you go looking for employee recognition and accolades,
you’re either a saint or a masochist. Recognition isn’t part of the culture,
anywhere, despite much effort in trying to teach managers the value of positive
reinforcement, and meaningful rewards.

There’s even a social angle. The remains of the old “boss
coming to dinner” sitcoms are now a weird sort of peer group mechanism, easily
exploited by management. The much loathed “meetings for everything” syndrome is
part of this process. Workaholics blunder through this extremely picky, friction-generating
environment like the horse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which
literally worked until it died, working for the ruling pigs.

Cynics can exploit this very disingenuous situation easily.
They don’t believe in any form of work ethic and simply work on managers more
than their jobs. The workaholic comes up for air once every few years and
wonders where their promotion went.

If you want to work like a maniac:

Make
sure you work for something worthwhile.

To
hell with office gulags. Either the work environment is acceptable, or it
isn’t.

Don’t
destroy your health. You can’t go out and buy a new you when the old one
wears out.

Don’t
ignore stress. When you feel lousy, it’s because you are feeling lousy.

Don’t
do anything and everything simply because it’s there. Delegate, avoid,
whatever, but don’t lose your life to your job.